Oleg Deripaska is a famous Russian businessmen and a regular participant of the ratings published by the Forbes magazine. His way to success and prosperity wasn’t long but the results are impressive.

Oleg Deripaska was born 2 January 1968 in the town of Dzerzhinsk to a common family. His parents came from Kuban, a region in the southern part of Russia. In 1985 he finished school and entered Moscow State University, Physics Department. Like all Soviet young man he joined the army and spend two years (1986-1988) with the Strategic Missile Forces.

His fellow students say Oleg was a very enterprising person, who found a way to make money before he got a degree. Oleg graduated from the university in 1993, but he had no wish to become a physicist – being a last-year student Oleg was appointed a financial director of so-called Military Financial Investment Company – that is how his incredible career started.

Upon graduation from the university, Mr. Deripaska founded a small metals trading operation and established a foothold within the domestic metals industry, which was rife with opportunity following the fall of the Soviet Union. Virtually all the profits from these operations were used to acquire the initial package of shares of the Sayanogorsk Aluminum Smelter, the nation's third largest electrolysis plant located in Eastern Siberia.

In 1994, Mr. Deripaska became Director General of the Sayanogorsk Aluminum Smelter. In an environment of market uncertainty and labor related strife, under his leadership the plant became the leading player in the industry in terms of profitability, technological development, product quality and environmental safety.

In 1997, the Smelter became the core asset of Sibirsky Aluminum Group, the forerunner of Basic Element. The Group united several enterprises of the aluminum complex producing a wide spectrum of goods from rolled metal and intermediate products to components for aerospace industry, shipbuilding and motorcar construction, aluminum foil, as well as large-capacity railway containers and flatcars.

At the end of 1998, the Sayanogorsk Aluminum Smelter was named among the 20 leading Russian companies by Expert, one of the most reputable business magazines in Russia. At the beginning of the year 2000 Sibirsky Aluminum became one of the world's top ten producers of aluminum products.

In 2000, he combined assets with Roman Abramovich (Forbes No. 10) and created the aluminum giant Rusal, which seven years later absorbed its only competitor SUAL, and made Deripaska, with a fortune of $ 28.6 billion, the richest businessman in Russia and No. 9 in global ranking Forbes. At the same time, Deripaska wanted to merge Rusal with MMC Norilsk Nickel and create a global company producing aluminum, nickel and platinum, but failed: the cards were confused by the crisis, huge debts and a corporate war with the head of Norilsk Nickel Vladimir Potanin (Forbes No. 1). Rusal still forms the basis of the businessman's fortune.

Rusal, along with Deripaska's energy companies, is part of the En + Group holding, valued at $ 8 billion during its IPO on the London Stock Exchange in November 2017. About 6% of En + Group then belonged to Polina Deripaska, the wife of a businessman and daughter of Valentin Yumashev, Boris Yeltsin's son-in-law.

Charity

Under the terms of the deal with OFAC, a 3.22% stake in En + was transferred to Deripaska's charitable foundation Volnoe Delo, which has allocated 4.5 billion rubles over the past 10 years to finance projects in education and culture. 

Capital 

$ 2300 million (2021), Forbes: # 41

Some facts about Oleg Deripaska

He resides in Moscow.

He is known as Vladimir Putin’s friend and often accompanied him in his trips.

His hobby is “consumption of concentrated information”, which means books and the Internet.

Got married in 2001 and has two children.

Deripaska's Telegram blog, created in January 2020, has 79,000 followers.

Sources:

    www.my-b.ru
    www.lenta.ru
 

Pictures:

    www.ogoniok.com
    www.nsp.su
    www.compromat.ru